D is for Discovery
by Saliere
Summary: Charlie has a discussion with a stranger in an airplane. Written for the Numb3rs slash ficathon ABCs of Crime challenge.


Warnings: hints of slash pairing/incest; spoilers for the first episode of season three and earlier in the series.

Summary: Charlie has a discussion on an airplane.

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D is for Discovery

Charlie is heading back to California. Back to L.A. Back...

He flinches. His break-up with Amita had been ugly. She had given up a great opportunity to advance her career so she could be with him. She had finally given him, given _them_, a real opportunity to work. And once it had been finalized, solidified, _realized_- he discovered that he didn't want her.

He had been chasing her ideal: a beautiful, brilliant woman. He had never really thought about what would happen when he caught her.

While they were together, he had found himself unable to keep his attention on her. He became even more hopelessly obsessed with his brother's work than he had been before.

_Scratch that_. He became more hopelessly obsessed with his brother than he had been before.

_This is pathetic._

Don. Fierce, strong, obscenely attractive-

_Your brother._

Charlie remembers their conversation, when he first expressed his uncertainty about Amita.

"_She wants the same things you want." Don's voice was low, his eyes shadowed._

"_Maybe I don't want those things though. You know?" Charlie was nervous, his gaze focused on Don as his brother swiveled to stare at him. Don sat himself up._

"_Well, I don't know, I mean- I don't know if relationships are ever exactly," He paused and looked at Charlie again._

"_...what we want."_

"So are you coming home, or visiting?"

Charlie is startled out of his reverie by the girl sitting next to him. Well, to be more precise- and Charlie prefers to be precise, there is an empty seat between them, so she is sitting two seats down, by the aisle. She seems as though she is in her early twenties, with short black hair and half-lidded eyes that look at him with mild curiosity.

He blinks at her.

"Hu- er... what?" She is holding a closed book- a little more than two hundred pages, Charlie estimates. Had she really finished it? She'd barely started reading an hour ago. Or was it two? How long had he been sitting there, preoccupied by his problems?

She reddens.

"Sorry- I didn't mean to bother you. Were you thinking about something?"

"Oh! Um- not really. I was just- my brother... I'm coming home. I've been at a conference back east."

"Really? With that expression, I thought you were thinking about your girlfriend or something." Charlie's face blanks, and the girl's eyes widen as her mind catches up with what she's said.

"My name is Diane, by the way. I'm coming back from visiting my little brother!" She says quickly, to cover for it.

"He's in the military, so I don't get to see him very often." Her face brightens as she speaks, her tone suddenly excited.

"He's adorable, want to see him?" Without bothering to wait for Charlie's answer, she whips her wallet out and shows him several pictures of a young man in a Marine dress uniform. Of the fourteen pictures in her wallet, nine of them contain her brother. She chatters for a few minutes, describing this accomplishment and that, and Charlie has to smile at her enthusiasm.

"It's great that you get along so well," He tells her.

Something flashes in her eyes briefly, but she keeps smiling at him.

"What about yours?" She asks.

"M-mine? Well he's a- an FBI agent. I help him with his cases occasionally." An understatement. Though Don does solve a good number of cases without the help of the young professor, Charlie is almost perpetually bogged down working equations for some of the more problematic crimes.

She is interested, and says so.

"I'm a professor of applied mathematics at CalSci. I sometimes work as a consultant for different agencies, including the FBI."

Her forehead wrinkles as she tries to figure this out.

"I help find patterns in criminals' movements and behaviors." Charlie prepares himself to give one of his usual explanatory speeches, but it proves unnecessary.

"Ah, you mean like geographical profiling?"

"Yes, sometimes like that. You're, ah, familiar with that?"

"I do a lot of reading..."

The conversation dies after this, and Charlie is once more overtaken by his musing. Despite his best efforts, his thoughts spiral inevitably back towards Don. Daydreaming about Don is a road well traveled for Charlie's mind, so trying to think about anything else once he's started is rather like trying to get water to flow uphill. Even math provides no relief, since anything he works on makes him wonder if Don has any more projects for him.

Charlie finally gives in and lets his mental image of Don strip dance.

"You must really love him."

Diane leans over and smacks his back a few times as Charlie chokes in his seat and has a coughing fit.

"Jeez, are you okay?" She asks, once he's recovered.

"Fine, just fine."

"It must be nice for him, I was going to say. To have his little brother do the hero-worship thing."

"Hero-worship thing?" Charlie is taken off-guard again, and he sounds almost offended.

"Maybe it's different for brothers. You have someone you can really look up to, I guess. I was pretty selfish as a kid, and my brother grew up hating me. I've never been able to bridge that gap. We've just always lived in different worlds." Her voice is soft and her face unreadable. Charlie bites his lip.

"I can understand that feeling." Another understatement. He continued:

"For a while, I thought I hated my brother. I went out of my way to aggravate him at times. I mean, that's actually how we started working together. I went through some of his papers-"

"A sure-fire way to get any older sibling mad," The girl observed dryly.

"Exactly. Anyway, I found a map that listed the sites of several attacks by a serial rapist. I created a formula to determine the approximate location of the rapist's home and workplace- Geographical profiling, as you mentioned earlier. Ever since then, I've been helping with cases."

"That sounds more like you were trying to find a way to get his attention than aggravate him. How cute." She smiles. Charlie doesn't. Too many of her remarks are hitting home.

When had his attraction to Don first manifested itself? He feels as though he's been trying to get the older man's attention his entire life. He'd come so close to convincing himself he hated his brother. He'd stored up all of his bitterness and resentment. He felt the heat of it when they argued. But somewhere along the line, he'd lost his grip on it- or perhaps he had held it too tightly. The heat he feels now has nothing to do with their past- and at the same time, it has everything to do with it. Every part of their relationship is so _intense_: anger, love, resentment, admiration, regret- The brothers don't know how to be anything but intense. Obsession is in their nature.

"Does your brother still hate you?" Charlie needs to know. He doesn't understand how she can still smile as she nods.

"He threw me out, as a matter of fact. He left to get away from the family."

"Then why did you go visit him?"

"He's my little brother. However he feels about it, I'll always be there for him." She pauses for a moment.

"You know, my father once told me, 'Your friends and boyfriends will come and go, and your mom and I will get old- we won't be able to take care of you. Without your brother, you'd have to face this world alone. You two are going to be the only constants you'll have in this life. You need to look out for each other.'

"Of course, at the time I had just beaten the kid up, and Dad was pretty ticked off at me. But that lecture stuck with me. Even if he can't stand me, I'll still look out for him. He's more important to me than anyone else in this world."

Charlie can't look at her.

"That doesn't sound healthy."

"Oh- don't get me wrong. I'm not weird or anything. I've got a boyfriend and all that. I love my brother, I'm not _in_ love with him."

"I see. Yeah, that would be pretty weird, right? It would be- downright freakish." Charlie can't hide the despair in his voice, and she catches it. Her eyes open completely for the first time since she started speaking with him.

"Ah- you poor kid." Charlie is the better part of ten years older than Diane, but she ignores this inconvenient fact. She speaks quietly, aware that spreading her discovery across the plane would not be the wisest course of action.

"That has to be hard on you."

Charlie's face flames. He runs back through the conversation mentally, and is relieved to recall that he never gave her his name. He had told her that he worked at CalSci though, and she could easily look him up if she had a mind to.

"Don't you have, ah, a book to read or something?

"The plane is landing soon," Diane points out.

Indeed, the "Fasten Seatbelt" lights are on, and Charlie has somehow missed hearing the announcement.

"Look" They start at the same time. Diane is determined though, and Charlie lets her speak.

"I didn't mean to insult you. I'm in no position to judge whether anyone is weird or not. And kid, I don't get a 'freak' vibe from you, and I'm pretty good at telling who's going to be a creep."

"Do you work in law enforcement?"

"Retail. Customer service is a bitch." Charlie gives a small laugh at this.

"Ha! Got you to laugh." Her eyes are half-lidded again, and her smile is in its customary position.

"It's not that bad. Maybe it will work out for you two."

Charlie regards her with defensive arrogance.

"And what evidence are you basing that statement on?"

"I have none. Merely uninformed speculation and a vague wish for everyone to end up happy. You win- the world is a bleak and lonely place, where love is hopeless and happiness forever out of reach."

They are silent until the plane lands, and leave without another word to each other.

Don picks him up by the baggage claim.

"How was the trip?" Don puts a friendly hand on his shoulder, guiding him through the crowd toward the exit.

"Fine, it was fine." Charlie is carefully not paying attention to the electricity running up and down his back as Don's fingers remain firmly pressed against the inside of his shoulder blade.

"Oh yeah? Do anything fun?" Don has leaned in a little to be heard. It's always noisy at LAX. Charlie's face is flushed, Don's breath is warm on his ear.

"I- I went to the, ah, conference."

Don pulls back a little, his face comical in its dismay. Charlie suddenly finds it much easier to breathe.

"Jeez Chuck, you need to live a little. There's more to life than just work, you know."

Charlie gapes.

"This, coming from you! You live work! You breathe it! I'm pretty sure you eat it for breakfast with your coffee." They laugh.

"Yeah well, you're right about that I guess. But there's nothing wrong with wanting to see you happy."

"I guess-" Charlie turns to face his brother only to find Don has leaned in to listen. For a moment, they're so close their noses touch as they exhale. Charlie whirls forward, nearly giving himself whiplash as Don leans back again, licking his dry lips.

"Charlie-"

"Hey Professor!" Diana voice rings from across the crowded airport. Charlie turns toward her and she grins.

"That's empirical data! I'm using it as a basis for that hypothesis!"

Don frowns.

"What's she yelling about?"

"Oh you know, just math stuff." Charlie is noticing that Don's arm had followed as he turned, and was now loosely wrapped around him. Don notices a moment later and drops it.

"You ready to head home?"

Charlie smiles.

"Yeah. Lets do that."

And now Charlie is heading back home.

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Author's Notes: I've been writing this while fevered, coughing and sneezing, and with a constantly dripping nose. I apologize if the quality has suffered for this. Also, I don't have a beta, and I'm not great at self-editing. So I'll probably look back on this fic in horror once I'm healthy (and lucid). 


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